"Telematic Dreaming" began in Finland in June 1992. I received a
commissioned from the Finnish ministry of culture to take part in the
"Koti" exhibition, the Finnish word for "home", at the Kajaani Art
Gallery. The title of the show was drawn from the notion of home as
Jean Baudrillard presented it in his essay "The "Ecstasy of
Communication". The commission came at a time when I was currently
exhibiting "Think about the people now", a hypermedia joystick
orientated programme produced on a Commodore Amiga computer. The piece
focused on the media interpretation of the events in London's
Whitehall on the annual "Remembrance Sunday" in 1990, when a man in
the crowd set fire to himself in protest. The programme allowed the
user to reconstruct the events through the misleading accounts of the
media. The work was awarded the Golden Nica at the Prix Ars
Electronica in 1991 and was later exhibited at the MuuMedia festival
in Helsinki in 1992. It was here that I made the original contact
with the "Koti" exhibition.

By this time I was very enthusiastic about starting a new
project that would deal more directly with my earlier research in the
area of telematics. This was really my background. Previous to "Think
about the people now" I had been working on several
art-telecommunication and computer networking events, initially as a
student of professor Roy Ascott and later as his colleague. As a
student at the School of Fine Art in Newport, South Wales, I was
enthralled by Ascott's vision of a networked community and its global
authorship. However, It was in the form of a "telematic workstation"
we were manifesting this view that presented a conceptual problem for
me. To understand a telematic art event you must be able to comprehend
the dynamics of the computer network, which is only possible by
accessing the network and interacting directly on the artwork
yourself. This required a new criterion, the artist and the viewer
become one in the same thing - a user, and the artwork is in an
endless transformation of interpretation. This was the concept five
years before the WWW had exploded onto the Internet, when public
access was extremely less than it is today. We were setting up
"telematic workstations" (clusters of Macintosh computer terminals),
in public exhibition spaces and festival sites, connecting them via
modems to the European Academic Research Network (EARN), now referred
to as the Internet, and exchanging E-Mail letters, texts, reports,
stories, poems, riddles, lies and confessions, we even found elaborate
ways to convert simple images into asci text and attach them to E-Mail
messages. These telematic events involved a large number of
contributors from around the world, of which the "Digital Art
Exchange" at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and the
Hochschule fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna had collaborated with us on
numerous occasions. It was the very last project of this kind I took
part in that I felt most satisfied with. In March 1991, two weeks
before the end of the Gulf War, we installed a telematic workstation
at the Watershed Media Center in Bristol, concurrently to similar
installations in Vienna and Pittsburgh, entitled "Texts, Bombs &
Videotape". We performed a telematic critique, demonstration and
satire of the media war in the Gulf. This particular workstation
succeeded in manifesting the interactive discourse in the form of a
performance, the workstation itself became a simulation of the TV news
room scenario, reconstituting information - making media about media.
It was this project that brought me towards the concept for "Think
about the people now" and consequently to Finland the following year
in 1992.

It was the decision of the "Koti" exhibition curators to use
Jean Baudrillard's essay as a starting point for a new installation.
Initially, it would not have been my first choice, since "The Ecstasy
of Communication" is contra to the concept of my previous telematic
work. However, Baudrillard's theoretical position does identify the
problematic form of the "telematic workstation", which was extremely
influential on the development of "Telematic Dreaming" and later
works. Whilst I am in support of his opinion, I am not of his
critique. The following quote is taken from a much earlier essay
entitled "Xerox and Infinity" that clearly identifies Baudrillard's
position.

"The celibacy of the machine brings about the celibacy of
"Telematic Man". Exactly as he grants himself the spectacle of his
brain and of his intelligence as he sits in front of the computer or
word-processor, the "Telematic Man" gives himself the spectacle of his
fantasies and of a virtual "jouissance" as he sits in front of his
"minitel rose". He exorcises "jouissance" or intelligence in the
interface with the machine. The Other, the sexual or cognitive
interlocutor, is never really aimed at - crossing the screen evokes
the crossing of the mirror. The screen itself is targeted as the point
of interface. The machine (the interactive screen) transforms the
process of communication, the relation from one to the other, into a
process of commutation, ie. the process of reversibility from the same
to the same. The secret of the interface is that the Other is within
it virtually the Same - otherness being surreptitiously confiscated by
the machine."

"Telematic Dreaming" is an installation that exists within the
ISDN telephone network. Two individual interfaces are located in
separate locations, these interfaces in themselves are dynamic
installation systems that function as customized videoconferencing
units. Double beds are positioned within both locations, one site is
blacked out, the other illuminated. The bed in the light space has a
camera situated directly above it, sending a live video image of the
bed and a viewer/user laying on it, to a video projector located above
the other bed in the blacked out room. The live video image is
projected down onto the bed with another person laying on it. A second
camera, next to the video projector, sends a live video image of the
projection on the bed back to a series of monitors that surround the
bed in the illuminated location. Quite simply, the telepresent image
functions like a mirror that reflects one person within another
persons reflection. "Telematic Dreaming" deliberately plays with the
ambiguous connotations of a bed as a telepresent projection surface.
The psychological complexity of the object dissolves the geographical
distance and technology involved in the complete ISDN installation.
The ability to exist outside of the users own space and time is
created by an alarmingly real sense of touch that is enhanced by the
context of the bed and caused by an acute shift of senses in this
telematic space. The users consciousness is within the telepresent
body controlled by a voyeurism of its self. The cause and effect
interactions of the body determine its own space and time, by
extending this through the ISDN fiber optic network, the body can
travel at the speed of light and locate itself wherever it is
interacting. In "Telematic Dreaming" the two users exchange their
tactile senses and touch each other by replacing their hands with
their eyes.

The success of "Telematic Dreaming" introduced me to Jeffrey Shaw from
the
"Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnology" (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Shaw l
ater invited me to become an Artist in Residence at the ZKM, to research
and produce a new telematic installation for the "ZKM - MultiMediale 3" in
November 1993. It was my intention not to deviate too far from "Telematic
Dreaming", to produce a work that was very similar in its technique and
form.

"Telematic Vision" is an installation that exists within a telepresent
space, located between two large blue sofas that are geographical
separated. A video camera, situated directly in front of one sofa, sends a
live image, of a viewer/user sitting on it, to a chroma-key "blue-box"
video mixer. Another camera situated in front of the other sofa sends an
image of the second sofa and another person to the same video mixer. The
two sofa images are mixed together, putting the two dispersed viewers/users
together on the same sofa and telepresent screen. The combined image is
finally fed to a series of monitors that surround each sofa, making it
possible to control the body at a distance from all angels around each
sofa. In many ways the sofa and the bed amount to much the same thing, they
can transform themselves into each other, as a "sofa/bed". The semiology of
the bed, that proved to be so effective in "Telematic Dreaming", is also
present within the sofa and is equally as effective. Where "Telematic
Vision" and its sofa differ from "Telematic Dreaming" and its bed, is in
the scenario and theater of its spectacle. The sofa finds itself between
the bed and the television, whilst it retains the semiotic reference to the
bed, it also refers directly to television. The television and sofa are
caught up in an inseparable scenario. In "Telematic Vision" the sofa is the
seat from which the spectacle of television is viewed, and the only
spectacle that is viewed is the audience who sit on the sofa.

In both works, "Telematic Dreaming and "Telematic Vision", the
viewers/users can only communicate by visual gestures, vocal contact is not
possible. They have to adopt the role of silent performers, without them
the installations are only vacant spaces of melodramatic potential. As an
artist I provide the context, I design the dynamics of the system around an
object of psychological complexity, such as a bed or a sofa. For this
reason, the work is extremely intense, and audiences are sometimes
reluctant to take up the role of the performer. This is usually because
they are initially concerned about performing in front of an audience.
However, once the viewer takes on the role of the performer they lose
contact with the audience and discover that the actual performance is
taking place within the telematic space, and not on the bed or sofa. The
performers lose consciousness of the embarrassing situation they had
previously assumed and become the user. They do not notice that the local
body is moving in local space, they are only aware of the distant body
interacting in telematic space. A new heightened perception of the self is
developed. The performers actual body can only be viewed from within,
whereas the users telepresent body can be viewed from a far. Bringing your
self back to your actual body is as hard as getting yourself onto the bed
or sofa in the first place, and being able to communicate in the actual
space and the telematic space simultaneously is almost impossible.
"Telematic Dreaming and "Telematic Vision" can clarify that my body is
wherever it is interacting, and that it can interact wherever I chose to
telepresent it.